Two followers and not a story to my name.  That's pretty impressive, if I do say so myself.  One of these days, I'll write a story, I swear.  But in the mean time, take a look at a project I have been working on:

Okay, so about a week ago, I got to thinking about something ShortSkirtsandExplosions said in a stream: the feature box is dominated by a few writers whose popularity is enough to catapult any new story they write into the feature box.  It seemed to support my observations, but I decided to find out just how true that is, and just how much is confirmation bias.

I started a study where I would record the name and author of every new story to enter the feature box, ignoring the updated stories (so only the first seven stories listed).  To get a better picture of the entire fandom, I turned the mature filter off.  Since I figured I'm tracking data on a bunch of stories, I would also record additional data, like which characters were tagged (looking out specifically for the Mane Six and OCs), the rating, the genres, and the word count in the hopes of getting a better feel for the feature box.

The study so far includes 33 stories, with only 1 repeat author (although it did include a couple of familiar names).  Half the stories were tagged with sex, and two-thirds are romance stories.  The most tagged show character is Twilight Sparkle, specifically tagged in a third of stories.  Of the crossovers, half of them are Doctor Who crossovers.  Much to my surprise, a Fallout Equestria story breached the featured box (and is the only story tagged with gore).

This study is still on-going, though, so this might change as the sample size grows.  If anyone is interested, the worksheet is a Google spreadsheet you can find here.

That's all for now.